Taki Overboard

Hollywood has done very well out of the tragedy. The 1958 A Night to Remember, starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, is my favorite, and the Winslet Titanic is also good, but total bullshit.

The absolute last place for truth, historically or otherwise, is Hollywood. That being said I prefer 1958s A Night to Remember with Kenneth More and David McCallum. A superior film despite including the fake news described in Taki’s article. The memorable scene for me was when the engine room chief sets down his glass and contemplates the tilt of the liquid. One can read his thought ‘we are cooked, we can’t give up’. It was real. More real than a Hollywood-fake waif handcuffed to a pipe. Robert Wagner has been in the news lately. The Stanwyck tryst and Wood drowning. This brings to mind Teddy Kennedy’s Titanic. Too bad the media is/was not as concerned with that maritime disaster.

April, according to the poet, is the cruelest month, and it got crueler 106 years ago when the Titanic hit the iceberg—and Hollywood the jackpot, after the sinking. Being a shipowner’s son—tankers and dry cargoes, not passenger ships—I sympathized with the owners, White Star Line, pushing the envelope to set a record, but still. Going full out in a minefield of icebergs known to lurk nine-tenths beneath the water’s surface is like defending Harvey Weinstein nowadays—one’s bound to end up in the you-know-what.

The great ship went down on April 15, 1912, with the loss of 1,517 lives, and a new exhibition at England’s National Maritime Museum gathers many of the real-life stories that took place on that fateful night. It has very little to do with what we’ve seen on the screen up till now, and even less to do with the myths about the tragic sinking…

Hollywood has done very well out of the tragedy. The 1958 A Night to Remember, starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, is my favorite, and the Winslet Titanic is also good, but total bullshit. Even eyewitnesses watching the great ship go down differed in their accounts. Some said it groaned and split in half, others saw the lights go out as it slid silently under. Mythmaking and fake news were the order of the day. There was money to be made, and all sorts of wild rumors became news and absolute eyewitness truths. Today The New York Times would have blamed Donald Trump for the sinking, as would The Washington Post. Not to mention CNN…http://takimag.com/article/taki_overboard/print#ixzz5DEb09KKv